I'd go with WYSIWYG on this one, that you need to open Word (or whatever program you plan to paste in) before you copy, since sometimes opening a new program will "dump" the clipboard. Then you won't get a "Paste" option because there's nothing there to be pasted. Whether that happens depends a lot on how much free memory you've got on your machine. I have had that problem on a couple of previous machines, but have never seen it on the current ones (all at least 256 MB RAM).

The other side of it is, you can lose what's in the clipboard if you close the program you copied from before you paste. Some programs assume that if you're done with the program you're done with what's in the clipboard, and will clear it when they shut down. This isn't supposed to be "Windows Compliant" behaviour, but might happen with some browsers. (Minimizing the program window shouldn't do anything to the clipboard content.)

19 inches to go????

John